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UCLA Broadcast News Archive

December 6, 2012

Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian for Digital Initiatives and Information Technology
University of California, Los Angeles

Sharon E. Farb
Associate University Librarian for Collection Management and Scholarly Communication
University of California, Los Angeles

 

Rapidly changing technologies of multi-modal communication are transforming the news industry: from the global reach of international satellite TV, to the proliferation of Internet news outlets, to YouTube. In parallel, “citizen journalism” is on the rise, enabled by smart phones, social networks, and blogs. The Internet is becoming a vast information ecosystem driven by mediated events (elections, social movements, natural disasters, disease epidemics, etc.) with rich heterogeneous data: text, image, and video. Meanwhile, the tools and methodologies for users and researchers are not keeping pace: it remains prohibitively labor-intensive to systematically access and study the vast amount of emerging audiovisual news data.

This presentation reviews and demonstrates applications of the Broadcast News Archive from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Library, a cross-disciplinary National Science Foundation-funded effort to digitize, analyze, and make available an unprecedented news resource for researchers worldwide. Leveraging UCLA Library’s growing digital collection of 150,000 hours of television news videos, including 9.7 billion image frames and 802 million words of closed captioning news text directed by the Communication Studies Department at UCLA and curated by the UCLA Library, a new paradigm is proposed for analyzing audiovisual datasets of social and political news events. Of note in the Archive is a Text and Image Parsing Project which has as its aims the categorization of news by topics and events; the analysis of selection and presentation biases across networks and media spheres in a statistical and quantitative manner; the experimental investigation of the cognitive consequences of concordant and discordant audio/visual information streams; and, modeling of the techniques of verbal and visual persuasion. More broadly, the project endeavors to reveal agenda-setting trends in the news, and uncover spatiotemporal patterns in the interactions of multiple mediated events. Through the interactive news interface, researchers will have the ability to visualize and interact with the project’s computation and statistical results.

http://newsscape.library.ucla.edu/

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Libraries, Information Access & Retrieval, Project Briefing Pages, Repositories
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Using the Cloud for Backup, Storage, and Archiving: Decision Factors, Experiences, and use Cases Explored

December 4, 2012

Michele Kimpton
Chief Executive Officer
DuraSpace

Geneva Henry
Executive Director, Digital Scholarship Services
Rice University

Holly Mercer
Associate Dean for Scholarly Communication & Research Services
University of Tennessee Knoxville

Mark Leggott
University Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island

 

In the past year, several organizations have made the decision to store, manage, and archive content in the cloud by utilizing the DuraCloud service. When moving their content into the cloud, these organizations had to weigh the advantages, disadvantages, and risks of using the cloud versus building and supporting a local solution. For Rice University, the key factors that supported the decision to adopt DuraCloud as part of its overall preservation strategy included the ease of working with the DSpace platform for ingesting content, as well as the ability to have a diversified distributed storage environment with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and Amazon working seamlessly on the backend for replicated storage and bit-sum checking.

Recognizing that digital preservation encompasses a range of activities and processes, but unsure where to begin, the University of Tennessee Libraries engaged two consultants to perform a “readiness assessment” in 2011 that recommended exploring outsourced options. In 2012, the University of Tennessee adopted DuraCloud as one component of its digital preservation plan specifically because of the DuraCloud capabilities for replication, geographic distribution, and “health checks.” At the University of Prince Edward Island, a more direct integration with DuraCloud was built in the Vault module for Islandora, which provides seamless application-level integration of DuraCloud with a Fedora-backed repository. Panelists will discuss decision factors that were assessed when determining whether to use cloud technologies, their experiences using DuraCloud, and how DuraCloud has become a part of their preservation strategy

http://duracloud.org

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages, Research Data Management
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Video at Risk: Preserving Commercial Video Collections in Research Libraries

December 4, 2012

Howard Besser
Professor and MIAP Director
New York University

Walter Forsberg
Research Fellow
New York University

Melissa Brown
Scholarly Communications Librarian
New York University

What will become of commercially produced circulating analog video collections in libraries, in the near-term? New York University studies reveal a significant number of mass-produced VHS titles distributed to the higher education market are now both out-of-print and held by a small number of institutions, posing an urgent and complex challenge to media collections managers. This panel comprises several in-progress findings from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded “Video At Risk” (VAR) project, designed as a practical map for libraries to systematically replace, migrate, and preserve these collections. The session will include an overview of the VAR project, information about the project’s Section 108 Guidelines for reformatting copyrighted materials, tests quantifying tape deterioration, and the project’s strategies for replacement

http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/research/video-risk/
Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, Digital Preservation, Project Briefing Pages
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Virtual Research Environments in Germany: Funding Activities of the German Research Foundation

December 4, 2012

Sigrun Eckelmann
Program Director, Academic Libraries & Information Systems
German Research Foundation (DFG)

Introduction by DFG (Eckelmann)
Presentation (Eckelmann PDF)

Steffen Vogt
Department of Physical Geography
University of Freiburg

Yvonne Rommelfanger
Research Associate
University of Trier

 

Tambora.org as a New Tool for Collaborative Work in Historical Climatology and Environmental History (Vogt)

Tambora.org is a virtual research environment (VRE) enabling collaborative work on the interpretation of climate and environmental information derived from historical sources. The open access VRE facilitates the sustainable storage and exchange of data among researchers. Furthermore it stimulates analysis, comparison and synthesis to derive new insights from raw data. The key information to be stored within the system is the original text quotation together with a bibliographic reference, place, time and coded information on climate and environment derived from the quote. To ensure the acknowledgment of the scientific work, all integrated data collections are citable by a DOI (digital object identifier).

http://www.tambora.org

Presentation (Vogt)

 

FuD: A Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities (Rommelfanger)

The FuD system integrates collecting, analyzing, publishing and archiving components to a virtual research environment for the humanities. Since 2004, the FuD system has been developed as a joint project of Humanities and Computer Sciences at the University of Trier (Collaborative Research Center 600 “Strangers and Poor People,” Trier Center for Digital Humanities). It has supported interdisciplinary cooperation in up to 30 research projects from various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The system and its development have incorporated their respective analytical methods as well as their special data requirements. Several projects at universities and research institutions throughout Europe are currently using the FuD research environment for their scientific work processes.

http://www.fud.uni-trier.de/

Presentation (Rommelfanger PPTX)

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Cyberinfrastructure, E-Science, Project Briefing Pages, Scholarly Communication
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What To Do with All of those Hard Drives: Data Mining at Duke

December 4, 2012

Joel Herndon
Head, Data and GIS Services
Duke University

Molly Tamarkin
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology
Duke University

Though research libraries face an increasing demand for collections and services that facilitate text mining, most digital text and e-journal collections are licensed for use and hosted by vendors in such a way as to prevent data mining. However, a few publishers have provided hard drives to represent “backup” copies of these licensed databases. Unsure what to do with the increasing collection of hard drives, and realizing that copies of this data could be easily obtained should the “backup” fail, Duke University Library decided to create a text mining collection within its Center for Data & GIS Services. Researchers at Duke can now access large volume text collections, either by using a lab designed for big data research, or on their own machines, via a system that provides working copies of large-scale text collections. Furthermore, the library has launched a series of workshops focused on research strategies surrounding text mining featuring a wide range of topics from managing text data structures to latent Dirichlet allocation. This presentation will describe the new services and data analytic methodologies while exploring continuing issues in text mining from licensing to access to research support.

Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Information Access & Retrieval, Project Briefing Pages, Repositories
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What We’re Learning from E-Text Pilots

December 4, 2012

Joan Cheverie
Policy Specialist
EDUCAUSE

Rodney Petersen
Managing Director of Washington Office & Senior Government Relations Officer
EDUCAUSE

Jarret Cummings
Policy Specialist
EDUCAUSE

 

Faculty, students, authors, and publishers all have a stake in the evolution of textbooks. As texts and business models are transformed variously by online interactivity and open-source content, what are the implications for the stakeholders? EDUCAUSE and Internet2 have been collaborating on e-text pilots to explore some of these issues. In addition to assessing how e-texts are best used, the multi-campus pilots seek to test new models for financing, distributing, and using e-texts. This session will include discussion about some of the policy issues, such as licensing versus sales, accessibility, affordability, rights, and privacy.

 

http://www.educause.edu/focus-areas-and-initiatives/policy-and-security/educause-policy/issues-and-positions/etexts-pilot-series

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, E-Books, Economic Models, Project Briefing Pages, Publishing
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Wikipedia and Libraries: What’s the Connection?

December 4, 2012

Merrilee Proffitt
Senior Program Officer
OCLC Research

Sara Snyder
Webmaster
Smithsonian Institution

It used to be that if you wanted information or answers to questions, you went to a library. In an era of increased reliance on major network hubs, information seekers increasingly turn to the web for answers. Therefore it is vital that libraries and archives ensure that their collections, or information about their collections, are easily discoverable on the open web. As the 6th most accessed website globally, Wikipedia is a natural place for cultural heritage institutions to expose their collections. Wikipedia articles receive a lot of web love: they are highly ranked by search engines; snippets from pages are incorporated into Google’s Knowledge Graph, and are pulled in by services like Facebook, filling in missing content. How can libraries and archives mesh with Wikipedia? This session will detail how OCLC Research, Smithsonian Institution, and others are connecting researchers to unique materials through Wikipedia, put a spotlight on the special role library data can play in Wikipedia, examine how Wikipedia data may be useful to libraries and scholarly institutions, introduce Wikipedia’s GLAM-Wiki initiative, and talk about ways that information professionals can work collaboratively with the World’s Largest Free Encyclopedia.

Filed Under: CNI Fall 2012 Project Briefings, Digital Libraries, Project Briefing Pages, Repositories, Social Media, User Services
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